The answer to Penalty Shootouts???

Was listening to this bloke rattling on on Radio 5 the other week about having a positive outlook on life, and among other things he came up with was a rather novel (and positive, which was the whole point of his philosophy on life) way of sorting out football matches without resorting to the nail biting and ultimately cardial arrest inducing penalty shootout.

He reckoned the way to do it was to keep a track of a certain statistic throughout the match and decide any tied games on it's total value.

And here it is...
the team who's goalkeeper touches the ball most times through the game (not including the keeper bouncing it to himself obviously) is deemed to be the loser (only in the event of a dead tie after extra time). This would not only encourage teams to have more shots on the oppositions goal, but would also discourage the boring "sit on a 1-0 lead by putting 11 men behind the ball" teams from passing back to the keeper (I can hear the Italians groaning from here!!).

I thought with a bit of thinking about it could actually work very well. You could have the running tally on the screen or scoreboard throughout the game...wouldn't half make the last 10 mins of a game interesting!

Was listening to this bloke rattling on on Radio 5 the other week about having a positive outlook on life, and among other things he came up with was a rather novel (and positive, which was the whole point of his philosophy on life) way of sorting out football matches without resorting to the nail biting and ultimately cardial arrest inducing penalty shootout.

He reckoned the way to do it was to keep a track of a certain statistic throughout the match and decide any tied games on it's total value.

And here it is...
the team who's goalkeeper touches the ball most times through the game (not including the keeper bouncing it to himself obviously) is deemed to be the loser (only in the event of a dead tie after extra time). This would not only encourage teams to have more shots on the oppositions goal, but would also discourage the boring "sit on a 1-0 lead by putting 11 men behind the ball" teams from passing back to the keeper (I can hear the Italians groaning from here!!).

I thought with a bit of thinking about it could actually work very well. You could have the running tally on the screen or scoreboard throughout the game...wouldn't half make the last 10 mins of a game interesting!

Any thoughts??

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This could be circumvented by defenders taking goal kicks and defenders smacking the ball into the crowd thirty yards down the pitch instead of passing back.

Maybe a good idea, but then where is the motivation to win? Teams could then just throw everything into defence!

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Exactly.

And with many of the teams in this world cup already employing the flat-back-nine formation to great effect, you'd just wind up with what happened in the euros all over again. Well organised but ultimately dull and unwatchable teams boring their way though better quality opposition by virtue of ultra-defensive strategy.